Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Alchemy is only ever going to get better and it is improving every year.

Soon Alchemy will make goldminers obsolete.

I think a misunderstanding is that people want to fight "scraping" or "automated systems". But my feeling is that the issue is with the _purpose_ of the scraping: It's not "that person is scraping my site" it's "that person wants to use my work to train their slop machine". The issue is the SLOP machine with all the negative externalities they have.
And that is a path worth exploring (that I have similarly argued for code): We want to contribute to the commons but there are specific uses that go against our values.
https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/114754224933740471

New @emf policy: Any speakers who supply a rider will have it granted, but interpreted in the manner of an evil genie.

"I would like a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed"

We have complied with your request and replaced the brown M&Ms with mildly annoyed beetles

Went to two frontend conferences in as many days, and learned a lot; not all of it what the presenters hoped I'd take away:

https://infrequently.org/2025/06/conferences-clarity-and-smokescreens/

Is Linux accidentally giving itself an unfair reputation for being difficult?

Helped a non-techy person on the phone get their wifi working on a Linux laptop, we solved it by them pressing the physical flight mode button and then toggling the wireless option in the GUI. Pretty easy, as easy as Mac or Windows.

BUT... when I initially looked this problem up on a search engine, the first page of results involved the command line and scary paragraphs of CLI text about hardware and drivers.

If this non-techy person had looked this up, they would have seen scary CLI options as top results, and been intimidated away from Linux.

#Linux

last time it kept overheating while trying to compile the kernel, and we had to hold it in front of the air conditioner for like an hour to get it to finish. this time around we should be able to skip that part by using the single-core trick we recently figured out for the laptop, so that's good

as we leave gpn and its lice jokes behind us and look ahead to a long summer full of more chaos events, let's all remember that infectious disease is a community issue. lice can't buy gulasch-genusspakets and wear those shitty wristbands; they don't care what city they're in or who organized the event that brought new people together and prime new louse real estate within crawling distance.

if lice were transmitted at gpn, the same will happen at other events – sure, scale might matter, but lets not pretend that this stuff stops when the jokes do.

when we share space and closeness in our bodies, we also share responsibility. this is, indeed, the point: what brings you joy brings me joy, and what hurts you hurts me; what makes you sick makes me sick, and what helps you helps me. we run on the same biological substrate; we share similar vulnerabilities, and similar desires; and when we acknowledge this by exchanging mutual care and joy in our embodied forms, let's reaffirm that shared responsibility, too.

take care.

A while back when I discussed plastic pollution in my newsletter Talking Climate, I said the most important way we can cut it is not by recycling (only 8% is actually recycled) but rather by advocating for plastic bans where we live.

And now, guess what - there’s peer-reviewed evidence this works!

Find the article here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp9274

Part of me wish I could rub the martyr culture text on the face of every anarchist group I've been that imploded because someone shouted in a discussion once, of every forest occupation that ostracised a combative comrade to this day because she made an opsec mistake once, every shelter who expelled a trans woman of colour into homelessness because she kicked a door in frustration once. (Actual examples.) This left scene where everything is reduced to individuals, perpetually evaluated for their worth under threat of pigeonholing like some sort of gig economy app, every isolated individual left off to fend for themself, simultaneously on the edge with chronic anxiety over the risk of being swiped left at any point, and reproducing the same carceral logic like so many Diogenes assholes wandering the streets with smug self-satisfaction, "I'm searching for a comrade who is not problematic".

But that's me internalising the German way of being; my desire to go show the Germans that this is bad. To point fingers and call out, call out to--who? To what? It's me doing what Sara in the interview calls the politics of complaint, the politics of "should be". The question is how to build autonomy from them. Tierra y liberdad.

> The standards that women [in the autonomous structures] come up for ourselves—because they're connected to our analysis of our, like, actual conditions, to what is necessary in order to, to win, to progress, you know?—those standards are often higher, actually. We end up needing to ask more of ourselves [than we ask of the men], not less. Whereas I find that in the USA, many times the approach to gender is like, well I'm more oppressed, then I should expect more of them... But this doesn't make sense. Like, if the men were going to free us, they would have done that yesterday. You know? We surely been complaining about it long enough.
> …And I think this is true for every axis of oppression. The person who holds the power is not going to give it to you, so autonomy is the answer, in this revolution.

I've talked of this before, of being abandoned by every single antifa organisation I knew of when the nazis came bang on the door, of me myself responding to a call for help in the face of violence only to find I was the only (1) single antifa to take up the call. Earlier I said that, if you want someone you can count on when the boots come, forget the German anarchists, go organise with the Kurds, the Zapatistas—I knew the Kurds were for real when the first heval I ever talked to offered to babysit my kids for months so I could visit Rojava, *within one hour of meeting me*; I think I know a grand total of 0 German comrades who would take family responsibilities for a fallen comrade for the cause, even a comrade they know for years, let alone a stranger. Now that I've been organising with Palestinians and their supporters of Arab background, I find the same communal spirit, the same commitment. I talked to a single Palestinian immigrant I met by chance about fascist threats to a place; they gave me their contact to call for backup; by the time the Nazis came scout they found the space occupied by over two dozen immigrants ready to throw down. Needless to say, the attackers were easy to dissuade.

When we tried to thank them they said "we thank *you*, for being in the struggle."

And each time I have to think, do I *have* to organise with parties and leadership cults to have this? Do I have to organise with tendencies so distant from my sex-gender politics? (Though these days, tragicomically, I feel safer dressing slutty along Muslims than around white feminists—the last person to condemn me for how I dress wasn't a religious conservative but a transgender anarchafeminist, while for every Middle-Easterner I ever met, us being on the same side is the determining factor.) Is it really impossible for anarchists to have community? But I know it's not, because I have read how it was in Spain, in Korea, in the Makhnovshchina or the Paris commune.

You have to think, *why* it is that instead of a martyr culture, we have a callout culture? These are social problems created by social conditions, it's not possible to individualise them. Something I've found out through experience is that the armchair criticism that Sara mentions, where some First World leftist looks at a revolution done in the Third World among war on all sides, hunger, literal genocide, only to go ah but they're too hierarchical, I heard the leader hits on women, they're fighting with a NATO army, etc., and then wash off their hands—this problem is literally invisible to First World people. They really cannot *conceive* of what it is, to be in conditions of material necessity. The absurdity of a beneficiary of colonialism engaging in the most damaging social structure of all every day, by keeping their jobs and consumption patterns and comfy walled lives, pointing fingers at people actually pulling off an anti-State revolution to go, oh but they're too patriarchal, not socialist enough etc.—this is a nonfactor, it means nothing. They are living in the world of activism, where the enemies are -isms. Which is to say, they do not know yet what it is like to have an enemy. So they will treat a man reproducing misoginy on your side as equivalent to an enemy, to be handled the same way. (Sara, paraphrased: "We only ever criticise comrades. We don't criticise enemies. What would be the point?")

In the worst case, these privilege-tinted lenses are bound to shatter when the enemy is at the door. But it sure would be cool if we could get our crap together before the shooting starts, so that we don't end up in "a situation in which the special forces break into your house and you need to take decisive actions, but your arsenal consists only of punk lyrics, veganism, and 100-year-old books" ("War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine").

Sometimes anarchist friends tell me that the Kurds or the Palestinians get to have community because they have the bond of nationalism, and we can't rely on that so we're condemned to individualism. But that's a gross misunderstanding of how it works, born out of ignorance and social distance; of how deeply these movements are steeped in internationalism. (European anarchists will tell me things like "this is not my struggle to claim, I cannot wear a kufiyah that would be Orientalist appropriation", meanwhile Palestinians are like "we are all Palestinians here! every one of us is Palestinians! here put on this kufiyah I want to show you to my family in Palestine", then recording on cellphone: "look at her she's my second daughter now", about someone she met the same week... Compare this to Sara's comments on her thought process after being told that the Rojava revolution "belongs to everyone".)

Do you love the idea of Free & Open Source Software, and Linux in particular? I certainly do. But until recently, I didn't think too much about what "freedom" means beyond licensing. If you're like me, this blog post by @fireborn could border on heartbreaking. But it may also be a call to action, not only for developers, but for the entire F/OSS community. I hope it is.

Excerpt: »Freedom is also not telling disabled users to go fuck themselves because they asked for a working login prompt. It’s not freedom if it requires you to be perfect, sighted, fluent in C, and emotionally bulletproof.«

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/you-dont-own-the-word-freedom-a-full-burn-response-to-the-gnulinux-comment-that-tried-to-gatekeep-me-off-my-own-machine/

found via @Natanox at https://chaos.social/@Natanox/114749881757130989

#Linux #Accessibility #FOSS #Gatekeeping

THIS.
I gonna save this to just post it every time one of those entitled FOSS-bros crosses my path.

If the only way for people to use a computer is to either become a developer yourself or suffer through exploitation by big corporations it isn't an individual failure of those people, it's an absolute failure of the FOSS / Linux community to build good software.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/you-dont-own-the-word-freedom-a-full-burn-response-to-the-gnulinux-comment-that-tried-to-gatekeep-me-off-my-own-machine/
#Linux #Accessibility

I spent a couple of hours yesterday getting Audacity building, reproducing and diagnosing the bug, and wrapping my head around the complex logic in this part of the code so that I could implement a correct fix. To have copilot review my work, which I contributed back for free, is just so incredibly disrespectful to my time and effort.

"America is so deindustrialized that they don't even manufacture consent any more."

i was bored and went down a rabbit hole of researching how computers are made and like. what do you mean we refine a stone and then etch pathways onto it. this is literally runic stone processing magic. we live in a fantasy world

"Ondernemers maken zich grote zorgen over mogelijk urenlange stroomuitval komende winter in delen van Brabant. [...] “Het vestigingsklimaat in Nederland wordt er zo niet beter op", zegt Jan van Mourik van werkgeversorganisatie VNO-NCW Brabant Zeeland. "Dat is onze grootste zorg.”"

Echt, flikker op met je "vestigingsklimaat". De "grootste zorg". Wat dacht je van alle mensen die zonder stroom zitten? Dat is blijkbaar minder belangrijk?

Als je er als bedrijf problemen mee hebt, dan draag je maar gewoon lekker bij aan de financiering van een oplossing. En niet weer gaan zeiken over 'vestigingsklimaat' en lekker de kosten van je grootverbruik externaliseren naar de maatschappij.

Helemaal klaar met dit soort figuren.

You don't have to "give it to AI" that it does some small useful thing in a bid for neutrality whenever you criticize AI. You can just criticize AI.

Being on the road again after quite a long time, I notice two main things: Dutch drivers tend to seem allergic to the right lane (even when there is plenty of space, it's like "ew no, that's where trucks/lorries/semis* go") and they have no concept of keeping distance. I'll try to keep a safe minimum distance (2 seconds, as a rule of thumb) and many drivers seem to think that's room for another two cars. I guess having a ton of steel and a crumple zone around you does make you feel safer than me on my motorbike.

*depending on your flavor of English